Welcome to the IE Team Blog!

We’ve heard loud and clear that many people want a better connection with the IE Team. We’re happy to do something about it.

Our goal in this blog is to be a good place, direct from the source, for information about IE. What are we working on? How do we make decisions? Why does some part of IE work the way it does? What keeps us up late at night? What are we thinking of around security, extensibility, and other key areas? Hey, any good tips and tricks?

Some people on the team have already been doing this on their own (see the links to the left), and I expect them to continue. We’ll do our best to round up information from other sites as well as providing original content. We’ll also do our best to make this useful and enjoyable. At any time, please tell us how we’re doing.

Thanks,

DeanProduct Unit Manager, IE

p.s. we promise an explanation of Microsoft titles, roles, and responsibilities in a future post.

Not quite. For example, the team is finishing up Windows XP SP2 now. We’re also working on security updates that apply to all customers of currently supported Windows versions. We’re not just about Longhorn.

Please don’t let IE’s market share keep it from being innovated and grown. I know, it’s not your call, but tell the MS leaders that the customers want their IE back! The time when IE drove the industry. The IE that won round one of the browser war. The IE that was COOL.

Not the somewhat tired, old and used up thing we have today.

I like IE. It works for me and has for years. I just wish it were better…

Well, I really have to post something here, since now is my best chance to actually have someone influencial to IE read what I have to say.

Why I don’t use IE

-It’s heavy and slow

-Security problems

-No tabs (quite practical thing)

– I cant trust it. I don’t know why, but whenever I use IE I get the feeling that I can’t trust it. I don’t know what it’s doing, and why.

– It lacks innovation and improvements

The truth is, that IE has not developed much over the last few years, it has got nothing new, and nothing better. My current browser is Firefox 0.8.0+ and frankly firefox has been better from like version 0.5.0 or so.

Tab browsing, mouse gestures, pop-up stopping… you name it. Finnishstudent wrote he doesn’t feel safe. I know I’m not safe. Using Opera I get a few spyware programs sometimes, but when I use IE… Wham! I have no reason whatsoever to use IE, it is old and leaky.

IE slow? Firefox is faster? Not in my testing. I found Firefox/bird caused my mouse to hang here and there when ever I clicked on something. Quit using it because of this.

IE is XP SP2 has some great new stuff. Especially around security. If you are moving to another browser because you think it’s more secure, just be careful. All software has its issues and for these other browsers, it’s only a matter of time.

Although an avid FireFox user, I’m happy to see the debate over recent browser innovations has brought the IE team out of hibernation and into a mode of determining how their product can better serve the web community.

Competition is good for everyone and, perhaps, the huge community swirling around Mozilla development will rub off on future efforts at Microsoft and versions of IE.

Also, I apologize for anyone decending on this blog and doing nothing but flame you guys. We all work hard and try to do our best and I respect that.

Something that has intrigued me for along time about IE is the use of HTML in its interface, a huge amount of its Dialogs are written using markup and JavaScript. For example the Find On this page, and About Dialogs.

Is their a reason so much of IE’s interface is built like this? It all smells a bit like there’s some cross zone nastiness hiding somewhere in all that. and that’s a smell that makes me a bit uneasy.

While I’m at it, I’m enjoying IE XP SP2, it’s nice to see users have got a handle on those BHOs without resorting to registry hacks 🙂

IE had tabbed browsing long before Mozilla or Firefox (or whatever it’s called now). Remember IE 4.x? Or was it 3.x that had tabs?

As for security – read something on XPI in Mozilla, it’s just like ActiveX controls in IE, except you don’t have to sign any code with a certificate, so anybody can claim to be you, updating your code (guess who is going to hear it from your users).

This is truely a step in the right direction! I’m excited to see how this goes. I’ve allways wished for a more direct way to communicate with developers of MS products. Before I’ve felt like I’ve stompted right into a huge iceberg.

I hope you guys actually learn something from what the web developers have to say. They know what they’re talking about, and from what I’ve seen, they haven’t made any false claims as yet about IE’s poor support of CSS (2 and 3). As [insert-forgotten-name-here] said in response to "I Love This Browser", it’s not an anti-MS thing. If Internet Explorer was even half as functional as Firefox (which – by the way – hasn’t even reached v1.0) I would maybe be less bothered by it.

Our goal in this blog is to be a good place, direct from the source, for information about IE. What are we working on? How do we make decisions? Why does some part of IE work the way it does? What keeps us up late at night? What are we thinking of around security, extensibility, and other key areas? Hey, any good tips and tricks?

Some people on the team have already been doing this on their own (see the links to the left), and I expect them to continue. We’ll do our best to round up information from other sites as well as providing original content. We’ll also do our best to make this useful and enjoyable. At any time, please tell us how we’re doing.

p.s. we promise an explanation of Microsoft titles, roles, and responsibilities in a future post.

I am :Scott Stearns, the test manager for the Microsoft Internet Explorer team (as Dean says we will be pulling together full bios of people later). The IE team as we usually say. Some of us have our individual blogs today, but we also wanted to have one that was focused on what we do every day at work &ndash; make Internet Explorer the best way for browsing the web. …

IE is ok. But the Active-X is security horror. Therefore i use Mozilla/Firefox. And i dont trust Microsoft. My opinion is, they kill many Innovations and acting unfair. And therefore i avoid MS Products. AND, IE doesnt run on LINUX…. 😉

i’ve been using IE for years, but i changed to firefox lately, not because of security issues, just because of comfort and great features. IE is a great browser, but it lacks so much, what could be called standart feature these days… tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, popup blocking…

by the way, what the hell is going on with outlook express??? have all coders of that pice of software died recently or what? it never changed since win98. OMG you are Microsoft… just do something for your software! develope it! 🙂 could you please just do this?

1. I want the possibility to uninstall the IE, because popup stuff always uses the IE!

according to this I decided to use Opera, my favorite browser.

But this did not solve my problems with popups, because the IE is still there and even as not primary browser it popups sometimes. so i tried to delete the IE myself, but this caused my system to crash, because many functions of the system, such as minimize all windows( desktop anzeigen), are built in features of the IE.

So I want to option to uninstall the IE or to disable the IE if uninstalling is not possible.

I think it is quite useless to discuss about shortcomings of the IE and any required improvements for the future because you will know your software and your competitors better than everybody else.

Close all the intentional and internally known backdoors and leaks … which are reserved for push techniques, maker´s influence on users, spying consumer activities and pleasing the editors of many websites with the same aims.

Just act fair in the market and in supplying products and service and you will end up with a better product and more satisfied customers.

Judging from MS´s history this seems to be an irrational wish but you now have the choice to convince me of the contrary or loose against OpenSource soon…

nice to see that you picked up work again on the IE. Honestly, I can’t see it become "the best browser in the world", but you could do a lot to make it better than it is. My major gripe with IE is its less-than-useful implementation of standards, especially

– the features it claims to but actually does not implement (correctly)

– the incorrect or missing fallback mechanisms for features it does not implement

This makes it really hard to create rich standard-compliant web pages which gracefully degrade on the IE. From past experiences I do not actually expect M$ to fully and correctly implement standards they did not create or "improve" themselves, but I do wish you would at least fix the fallback mechanisms.

> Something that has intrigued me for along time about IE is the use of HTML in its interface, a huge amount of its Dialogs are written using markup and JavaScript. For example the Find On this page, and About Dialogs.

> Is their a reason so much of IE’s interface is built like this? It all smells a bit like there’s some cross zone nastiness hiding somewhere in all that. and that’s a smell that makes me a bit uneasy.

I wouldn’t read too much into that if I were you. The majority of Mozilla’s interface is written using markup and Javascript too.

Jim: When was the last time you tried Firefox? It sounds like it’s been a while.

Jerry Pisk: XPI pacakges are nothing like ActiveX. XPI is closer to a Browser Helper Object, except that it prompts the user before installation. And authenticode signing hasn’t done much to slow malware. As for tabs in IE, the reason it is so hard to remember exactly what version it was is because it was a *dream*.

An effort to win the hearts and minds of computer users around the world! &quot;Weve heard loud and clear that many people want a better connection with the IE Team. Were happy to do something about it. Our goal in…

no doubt your servers logged that im on a mac running safari, but im interested to know how the worlds largest software corp owned by one of the worlds richest men and whoms software runs on 95%+ of the worlds computers will redress the balance with the abysmal security in IE.

Come on, Bills got the money you lot just seem to have got too lax with your marketshare being what it is and any old rubbish you release people have to swallow because half of them arent aware of alternatives and half of them are too tied in to MS to be able to change.

Serously, MS <b>IS</b> a monopoly and needs to respect its consumers give back more to them in the privileged position it finds itself. Any other industry would not allow any one company to have the market dominance MS does with out some kind of out side checks and balances, but for some reason this is allowed to continue in this industry.

Sorry, this is becoming too much of a rant but I feel ol’ Billy Gates needs a serious wake up call to the damage his leaking browsers doing to the internet and companies but the multitude of viri and spyware exploiting these holes and costing individuals time and money doesnt seem to make any difference.

Anyway, Good Luck and I hope youve got your photocopiers warmed up for when Tiger comes out 😉

Well, I’ve used IE since version 4 and I’ve always been content with it. Since I’m a relatively careful user (using an AV program, a firewall, installing all available patches and so on) I’ve never suffered from the many bugs and security problems IE contains.

A few months ago (when reinstalling my system) I gave Firefox a chance. What convinced my to continue using it were not security reasons but features/extensions like tabbed browsing, mouse gestures or the pop-up blocker. I didn’t know what I miss before I tried it myself. Whenever I use IE now, I find myself making mouse-gestures (which of course do not work).

I’m not one of these Windows vs. Linux or IE vs. Mozilla/Opera/whatever guys, I simply use the products that fit my needs best.

For other (especially more or less unexperienced) users, browser security may be more important – not everyone keeps his/her computer updated. That’s why I will probably install Firefox/Thunderbird on my familiy’s / friends’ computers to protect them from problems.

From my point of view, improving the underlying security concept of IE is the most important thing to do. But – please !- look at the roots not the leaves, even if this means rewriting things from scratch. This definitely means a lot of work. But it’s possible. You can do it – give it a try! 🙂

Security aside, W3C Standards are what it’s all about…until IE (developed by Microsoft, which has the most resources on Earth and, I believe, is a member of that standards-development body) will accept that developers want standards for valid, everyday life reasons (and not just to bash Microsoft), then developers will indeed bash MS.

Adobe and Macromedia are just two examples of companies that have excellent relations with their customers: Photoshop artists are respected, Dreamweaver developers are courted, etc. – none of us outside of Microsoft need Bill Gates to come do our dishes for us (we’re not asking MS to do *everything*), but the year-after-year, arrogant disregard for what *actual* CUSTOMERS want is beginning to reap its proper rewards.

Until such time as IE sports some of these *basic*, *necessary* features, here are a few resources that are more useful than the way-out-of-date marketing…opps, sorry, technical, info provided by Microsoft:

Sorry, but you’ll need Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape 7.1, or other Gecko-based browser to see some of these sites properly, since IE doesn’t fully support standards such as MathML, SVG, PNG, CSS, etc.

PLEASE, listen to us…some of us actually DO like IE…but it has caused more trouble than any other single piece of software is many of our lives…and I’m not saying that to be mean or make you feel bad.

I would LOVE to see an IE with incredible standards support and tough-as-nails security…wouldn’t happy developers constitute a small (or maybe not-so-small) army of marketers eager to tout the benefits of such an IE to all *their* customers, if they had a reliable browser from you?

The truth is that Microsoft has a habit of producing bad software – probably due to being closed sourced and the limited minds can’t produce anything else. It "looks" pretty on the outside, but, that’s as far as the beauty goes.

Linux is a wonderful product, which is winning the OS war, by the way, despite what you want to believe, because practically the entire world is working on it in some way – it’s open source. The source code for Microsoft products is kept secret and hidden, thus, severly limiting the amount of people who can work on it and, therefore, limiting its quality.

My suggestions is thus. Open ALL the source code for Microsoft products, thereby allowing more folks to improve it. Or keep it closed and continue to wane until such time as Microsoft products are no longer wanted by the public at all.

Microsoft Corp. is going to lose the revenue generated by it’s Microsoft Windows OS’s. Either by opening the source code to the public, or by the public demand for the products dying out. Revenue generated by MS Windows OS’s is going to be lost, one way or another.

I recently read a topic on internetnews.com saying the IE team (or at least someone called Robert Iliad, I think) has doubts on implementing full CSS-specs (and full PNG-support) in Internet Explorer because he thinks people are not interested in what developers can/should do, but more in their own features they like. Well, here’s the thing:

I agree that a user probably doesn’t have any concerns about wether the page they are looking at is layed out in CSS or a table layout, but wouldn’t it be nice if the page they are looking at was half the size? Wouldn’t it be great if they could visit twice as much internet websites with the volume they get from their internet provider? I think so. That was the first argument.

More and more website developers now have a button on their website which saids: ‘Get FireFox’. I like those buttons, but don’t want to place them on my own websites because it doesn’t look professional. I still have to create my websites so my users have the best experience they can get. In all browsers.

What I do take care of, is to make sure I allways have a FAQ on my sites. If the site they are visiting at that time, doesn’t display well, I advise them to get Firefox or Mozilla. A user starts thinking about the ‘good’ functionality of IE.

Well, I have a ton of other reasons to sum up, but here are my advices: